Free at last

At one point FanFiction.net had a button on their pages, so a person could share a story link on WordPress, which made it very easy for me to talk about the chapters of my fanfiction stories as I was writing them. Unfortunately they lost the button at some point. I’ve still been writing, I can’t really stop, but when a story dominates my mind I have a hard time doing something else in addition, like make blog posts. I did just two posts last year, and I still see people hitting my blog at some ridiculously low rate.

Hopefully that will change this year, as I have just yesterday written the last chapter of the last episode in my fanfiction epic ‘Nine2five‘. I started it in April of 2012, just a few months after my favorite show, Chuck, had aired its series finale, a very unsatisfactory finale. It prompted me to write a story to fix it. This led me to think of another story idea, somewhat more experimental in nature, but that’s one of the things fanfiction is good for.

While I was writing that, it occurred to me to write a story about a season of Chuck that I saw great value in, but most others did not, season 3 (S3). Chuck started out simple, about a nobody who got stuck with a computer database in his head and gets sucked into the world of international espionage, It quickly grew more complicated, with a strong romantic comedy element taking over from the spy drama. In S1 and S2 they maintained a decent balance. At the end of S2 they seemed to be firmly in the romcom camp, but S3 starts with them firmly in the spy-drama camp. Needless to say the fans were unhappy, and the show never recovered that balance.

I decided to rewrite S3. 19 episodes, broken into 4 chapters each. Not the story I saw underneath the plot (which was a darkly dramatic tale of betrayal and the recovery of trust), but the plot itself, written to mesh better in tone with the first two seasons (a humorous mix of adventure and romance), but do the same things, i.e., follow the same major plot points and come out at more-or-less the same place. And I did, although it came out to 80 chapters for various reasons. Then I decided to move on to S4, and then S5, in addition to making a prequel episode for the first one. In some ways this was a mistake, S4 is by far the weakest and most poorly written season of Chuck, while S5 is stronger plot-wise, but utterly devoid of humor or charm. I really ruined the latter half of the show for myself. Fortunately I’ve got my own version to take its place.

And now I’m done at last, with the last chapter written. I still have to post them on FF.net, but that’s easy enough, and doesn’t involve any more writing. All told I think this series will come out at over 600K words, or approximately 7 novels. (If I revised the first several chapters to have the amount of narrative the later chapters do, it’d be even bigger. I originally thought of it more as a script, with dialog and action, but not much scene-setting. As the story went on this didn’t work so well.)

This means I can spend a bit more time blogging, as well as working on my other stories, which have been hanging fire for years now. I met Tamora Pierce at Confluence years back, and she was very interested in one of them, which I came up with for their writing contest, so I’ll probably start with that one.